If I highligt the Trap Line above my Sample line, it becomes ungrayed but when I click on it, nothing happens.

Can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've read the Help screen many times over and no luck, hopefully you can help. I've entered in partial sample data of the report I'm using below. I have tried highlighting 5-6 lines of data, I've tried just 2-3 lines too. No luck. The Postal button is always grayed out unless I highlight the Trap area above my sample.

In over seven years of using Monarch, I've never had a need to use the postal trap. You can do all the work you need by trapping the area you want, and processing the data in the table, if necessary, using the Address Block feature.

Here, I'd just define a two line sample, starting on the CUSTOMER line, and define a single line field starting on line 2. Call this field ADDRESS, type MEMO, with advanced properties that it should only end on "blank field values".

Now define a two line sample ending[/B] on the "Invoice..." line, trapping the COD terms data. This will truncate your memo field for the Address, even if you don't need the COD data.

You can now define an address block in the table to parse your addresses.

Just to confirm Olly's suggestion - the Postal Trap was an early Monarch feature that requires some fairly specific address structure, as I recall, to be fully effective. It worked quite well back in the day when source reports tended to have that structure. But things became more flexible on the input side and the rigid address structures became less rigid. In some parts of the world they were never very structured anyway!

So the Address Block concept was created to provide greater flexibility, the Postal Trap bening retained for backwards compatibility and for inputs where the structure of the address records suited the trap well.

I've been using Monarch since V3 days and have rarely used the Postal Trap but then in the UK we have rather flexible addresses.

Working with US originated data I have probably only experiemented with it a handful of times and proposed its use maybe twice. Typically that would be when the input file is 'traditional' name and address list formatted to the standards for which the Postal Trap was intended.

Address data from databases are quite usually imperfect compare any 'rules' based processing required. The Address Block functionality recognises that problem and allows greater flexibility in working to extract better records from a higher percentage of the records presented in a report. It also provides a flag to identify records that are suspect and may be wrong at the end of automated extraction - a great feature for anyone needing to correct a database as part of the analysis work they are doing.